A review by rrose3000
Don't Tell Alfred by Nancy Mitford

Meh. I thought the first of this series--The Pursuit of Love--a nearly perfect novel of its bubbly witty mid-20th century genre, the second--Love in a Cold Climate--silly and oddly structured, but a fun way to revisit characters I like--and this one charming at points but a bit dull and overpopulated with characters I couldn't keep straight and didn't care about. There was also a focus, different from the first two, on satirizing subtle political events and I simply had no idea what was going on. The first two books were written and published in the 1940s and, where they dealt with world events at all, which wasn't a tonne, it was about WWII and it's preceding events and aftermath--even the most ill-informed has a general idea. But Don't Tell Alfred came out in 1960 and is set in the British embassy in Paris and there's a LOT about French-English wheelings and dealings and I didn't care in the slightest. Those bits were boring. There was also a lot of what I guess was satire about how stupid and selfish young people of the era were--the author was 11 years older than in the last book, and it showed darkly. I didn't enjoy those bits either.

Uncle Matthew is as good as ever and the assistant Northey has a few good echoes of Linda in Pursuit of Love but without any depth. This book, in its episodic wackiness and lack of emotional ramification reminded me--unlike the first two--of PG Wodehouse, whom I can only take in small doses.